THE CLUB RULES
Having Craig on campus was a help, most of the time. He was already a star player, being tracked by professional teams.
Craig had already gone through the tough transition that many students face when they reach college after going to a high school where teachers push the students and give them attention. In college, a lot of professors are only interested in their own research. They think of teaching as the part of the job they have to endure. They don't give students a lot of direction, but they still expect good work. When Craig first arrived, he remembered, he was "overwhelmed." He was used to breezing his way to the top. But by the time Michelle entered, he was able to give her good advice. One thing was something their father had told him: "You're not going to be number one at Princeton, but not the last either."
Michelle found her balance quickly. As friends remembered, she did more than handle all the course work. She finished it early. She wasn't intimidated by professors, either. One day Craig called his mother to complain. "Mom, Michelle's here telling people they're not teaching French right." Michelle thought the teacher should focus on conversational French rather than literary French. She wanted to be able to communicate with people, not just do academic research. By then, Michelle's mother knew better than to get between Michelle and a teacher. She told Craig, "Just pretend you don't know her."
Michelle also found a way around one of the biggest social perils for African American students at the time, Princeton's "eating clubs." These clubs, unique to Princeton, are a lot like fraternities or sororities. They tend to define the boundaries of a student's social life. The difference is that at Princeton, the official reason for joining is to have a place to take meals, rather than to have a place to live.
Although there are now clubs that choose members at random, joining one of the traditional clubs is like joining a fraternity or sorority. A student might have to endure a lot of interviews, or games, or contests. Then the members decide whether the student is right for the club. In Michelle's time, Princeton's social life was still dominated by the traditional clubs.
Like any club, they weren't just about letting people in; they were also about keeping people out. Jews were excluded until the 1960s—and later at some clubs. A few clubs excluded women until 1990. The last ones only gave in because of a lawsuit.
Few African American students joined. They "did not feel comfortable in the eating clubs," Hilary Beard remembered. Part of it was the "culture of drunkenness" at some clubs. "In that environment, a lot of things got said to people that might not be said when people were sober, and some of these things were disparaging racial comments."
Michelle didn't try to join a club. The idea behind them didn't fit her personality. She had chosen Princeton because it represented the wider world: new people, new experiences, new opportunities. She was not there to create a narrow, country club life surrounded by people just like her. At Whitney M. Young High School, she had been in a community of students who, like her, wanted to break down barriers. At Princeton, the social life was based on creating walls. Some students had selected the school because of those traditions.
But her rejection of them also showed a less obvious part of her personality. She knew something about Princeton's culture from Craig. She knew it wasn't exactly right for her. But she chose it because of the opportunities it offered, and maybe also because it was something that people would have liked to deny her. She'd later make other choices that people who knew her didn't think were right for her. Although her parents had raised her to do what would make her happy, she was still following traditional ideas about what that was. It would be several years before she would do exactly what she pleased.
Instead of joining an eating club, Michelle joined Stevenson Hall, an alternative student center that had been formed in the late 1960s as part of a student-led movement to open the university to new social and academic ideas. Her roommate, Angela Acree, worked there. It also helped define Michelle's social life, but in ways that would never have happened at a traditional club. Stevenson Hall had a kosher kitchen, because one of its roles was to provide a place to eat for Orthodox Jews, who would never have been admitted to a traditional club in the 1960s. Those students became their friends, Acree recalled to the university newspaper. "[We] did everything the Orthodox students did, which included going on a ski trip to Vermont with them one break."
Michelle also spent a lot of time at the Third World Center, which had been established for minority students. (That name is controversial now. It's thought to imply that the students were poor and poorly educated. Some schools with similar student centers still use that name, but Princeton's is now called the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Understanding. )
Michelle had a job at the center. She was the coordinator of an after-school child care program for children of Princeton's lunchroom and maintenance staff. Czerny Brasuell, the center's director, was amazed at her ability to bond with the children. Brasuell's son Jonathan, a preschooler, was one. Michelle and Craig became like big sister and big brother to him. The friendships continue to this day. Now in his thirties, Jonathan told the Boston Globe he still remembers Michelle thrilling him by playing "Linus and Lucy," the famous jazz piano piece from the "Peanuts" television specials. "I could not go a week without hearing that."
For Michelle, as for many African American students at Princeton, and maybe for most of them, the Third World Center became what the eating clubs were to white students. "The Third World Center was our life," Acree said. "We hung out there, we partied there, we studied there."
BALANCING ACT
Decades later, during the 2008 presidential campaign, opponents of Michelle's and Barack's would feel threatened by how much time Michelle spent at the Third World Center. They would use a paper Michelle wrote in her senior year, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community," to fuel fears that Michelle hates white people. That paper, a "senior thesis" of the kind all Princeton undergraduates must complete, would be published on the Internet. Every sentence would be put under a microscope.
What scared the critics was the paper's discussion of the isolation and rejection Michelle experienced at Princeton. "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before," she wrote. "I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus, as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second." Michelle wasn't describing how she saw herself; she was describing how she was seen. That was a common experience. It's true Michelle might have overstated the general rule—not every encounter of every African American student put race first. But that may have been Michelle's experience at Princeton. Or it may just be that, as with most senior theses written on a deadline by twenty-one-year-olds, not every word was perfect. Those small questions don't matter. What Michelle wrote about was not something she imagined, which is what Barack's opponents would say decades later.
The more important question, which is at the heart of her thesis, is an old one: Integration or isolation? Every ethnic group faces that question, constantly. Sometimes one side of the debate seems to be in favor, sometimes the other. While Michelle was at Princeton, it was almost impossible for African American students to ignore the question completely. Robin Givhan, a Princeton student at about the same time as Michelle and now a Washington Post columnist, told author Liza Mundy she felt pressure to socialize only among African Americans. She felt a little better when her Chinese American roommate told her, "I get that all time from the Chinese kids."
Sometimes the things universities did to help the problem only made the problem worse. Princeton, like Brown and some other schools, invited minority students to campus for Third World Orientation Week to take place before the regular orientation week. Michelle's frien
d Angela Acree remembered that she and Michelle couldn't understand the point. "We weren't sure whether they thought we needed an extra start or they just said, 'Let's bring all the black kids together.'" The answer was, the university thought the students needed an extra start. The result was, by the time other students arrived, the students who had been there for Third World Orientation Week already had a circle of friends made up only of minorities.
As Michelle pointed out in her thesis, Princeton fell short of offering more meaningful solutions. It had only five tenured African American professors. The Afro-American Studies department offered only four courses in the spring semester of her senior year.
However, unlike the image of her presented by Barack's opponents, Michelle's reaction to the difficult environment of Princeton, which some of her classmates still describe with resentment, was noticeably calm. She didn't imagine insults, but she didn't ignore them when they happened.
Howard Taylor, former chair of the Center for African-American Studies and one of Michelle's thesis advisers, recalled Michelle's moderate position on the question of isolation and integration. "She was not an assimilationist, but she wasn't a wide-eyed militant either," Taylor said. "She was able to straddle that issue with great insight."
The lasting memory of her friends and professors is of a person who sounds much the same as she'd be described today: balanced, funny, energetic, devoted to her parents, and focused on things that matter. She was still academically ambitious, too. She didn't just plan to be a lawyer; she planned to go to one of the best law schools in the country, and the most prestigious, Harvard.
5. THE PAPER CHASE
One of the traditions at Harvard Law School is that parents buy space in the back of the yearbook to leave a message for their graduating children. In the 1988 edition, next to serious, almost formal messages of congratulations to Michelle's classmates, is a message from Michelle's parents to her: "We knew you would do this fifteen years ago when we could never make you shut up."
Just twenty-four years old, Michelle now had two of the most respected academic degrees in the country. Doors would open for her. She'd be offered jobs starting at larger salaries than those her parents earned. If she did nothing more than avoid big mistakes, her career would continue to advance, thanks to the prestige of the Princeton and Harvard names. But as she had already found out, there was a price to pay for this kind of success. Not long after starting Harvard, she had called her former boss at the Third World Center, Czerny Brasuell, and admitted, "If I could do this over, I'm not sure I would."
She realized that she probably should have worked for a year after Princeton before deciding whether to go to law school. Instead, she had given in to common pressures. "The thing about these wonderful schools is they can be surprisingly narrowing to your perspective," she told reporter Rebecca Johnson. "You can be a lawyer or you can work on Wall Street; those are the conventional options. They're easy, socially acceptable, and financially rewarding. Why wouldn't you do it?" Earning money was important to Michelle. It was also urgent, because she had Princeton tuition loans to repay.
It's not that she hated law school. She just wasn't thrilled by it. Unlike some of the students, she was happy to remain in the background of discussions. Professors who taught Barack a few years later remember him as much more involved in class debates. When Michelle did speak up, she was more likely to disagree with a teacher than with a fellow student. She wasn't interested in the competition that takes place between students at Harvard. But, true to her pattern, she challenged people in authority.
The most important part of her three years at Harvard was not in the classroom. She worked at a legal aid office that was run by the students. Poor clients who couldn't afford a lawyer to handle conflicts with a landlord or a divorce or a problem collecting money that was owed could go to the students for help. If the dispute had to go to court, an experienced lawyer might help, but otherwise the law students managed their own work. It was perfect for Michelle. She spent a lot of time at the legal aid center. Colleagues remember her as serious about her work, and good at it, but also fun to have in the office.
PURPLE POWER
Having gone to Harvard, it was hard to resist the obvious next step. She took a job at a large Chicago law firm, Sidley & Austin. At the time, her father, who had been working for the city for decades, was making $40,000. Her starting salary at age twenty-four was $65,000.
But despite her interest in and need for a good income, her desire for interesting work was hard to fulfill at Sidley.
Her bosses tried, even though some of them believed she was too demanding. Unfortunately, large firms use young lawyers for the less interesting parts of legal work. Sidley also didn't handle cases that were as satisfying to her as working for the legal aid clients had been.
Then one day a colleague came into her office with a videotape. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting had just bought a new television show, and they needed a Sidley lawyer to work on the copyright and merchandise rights. Michelle found a conference room with a videotape player and pushed the cassette into the slot. When she pushed the PLAY button, a purple dinosaur danced across the screen and began to sing. Her new client was Barney. Work had just become a little more interesting.
Another of her assignments was to mentor a summer associate. Large law firms try to recruit top law school students to join their firms after graduation by bringing them to a grown-up version of summer camp. The summer associates are given a taste of legal work during the day, and in the evening—if they're interning at a competitive firm—they're treated to barbeques and baseball games and party cruises.
Some of Michelle's coworkers had met a particular summer associate during the interview process and somehow sensed that there'd be an attraction between him and Michelle. He was from Harvard Law, they said. He was older than the usual summer associates, because he hadn't gone to law school right after college. Sidley had taken him as a summer associate even though he had only finished his first year of law school. That was unusual. Apparently he was brilliant: His professors at Harvard were already talking about his future. The senior lawyers at Sidley were delighted that they'd snagged him. Just from the photo he'd sent in for the firm's directory there was a lot of giggling in the hallways about him being cute.
Michelle shook her head at all of it. "I had dated a lot of brothers who had this kind of reputation coming in," she told Obama biographer David Mendell. "I figured he was one of these smooth brothers who could talk straight and impress people." Michelle, who had always been about hard work, was skeptical that her colleagues even knew what to look for. "I figured that they were just impressed with any black man with a suit and a job," she later said.
They were impressed by more than that.
6. "HIS NAME IS BARACK"
Because she was going to be this new associate's mentor, Michelle looked for his picture in the directory Sidley was preparing. Not bad, she thought. But she quickly imagined a defect: His nose was too big.
That was typical of Michelle at the time. She had an instinct for self-defense. When she did date, she ended it before it could get serious. It was always the man's fault, she imagined. He fell short in some way. Too much this, not enough that. Her brother began to pity them as soon as he met them. "There would be no reason for me to dislike any of my sister's boyfriends," he told the Providence Journal. "It was always more you sort of felt sorry for them because you knew it was just a matter of time before they were getting fired." Not much time, in fact. "She fired 'em fast," Craig said. There was always a reason, though it doesn't seem like the reason was always serious. "They'd do something and she'd say, 'That's it.'"
Michelle's explanation was that none of these boyfriends were as good as her father. She was waiting for someone who met the standard set by him. Her friends and family figured she'd be waiting a long time.
There was more to it, as there usually is. Sometimes her father's example was an excuse. When she was being tou
gh on her boyfriends she was being tough on herself. She was trying to avoid making a mistake. Her perfectionist streak was coming out again. Like all perfectionists, a part of her worried that one wrong decision would mess up everything she'd accomplished. Anything that wasn't exactly right was totally wrong.
She also didn't want to get distracted by a boyfriend. As much as she wanted a family—and she wanted one a lot—she had worked hard to become a lawyer at Sidley, and there was more she wanted to do professionally.
All this gave her a hard shell. "My parents weren't very optimistic that I was going to find anybody who would put up with me," she told reporter Holly Yeager.
Then the summer associate who was supposedly a big deal arrived at the firm. Barack walked into her office and introduced himself.
Okay, she thought. His nose isn't so big. She was already starting to soften.
He was also tall, she noticed. She liked that. Michelle is 5'11" in bare feet, and she wears heels that make her taller. Barack is 6'2". He's actually not bad looking, she thought.
Barack's first impression of her: "Lovely." As he recalled it in his memoir The Audacity of Hope, Michelle had "a friendly, professional manner that matched her tailored suit and blouse."
Michelle was already playing it cool. She had her reasons, and at least one of them made sense: She was supposed to be his mentor at the firm. It wasn't the same as being his boss, but it was a professional relationship. She didn't think it was right to mix that with a personal relationship. Less reasonable: They were both African American. "I thought, 'Now how would that look?'" she told David Mendell. "Here we are, the only two black people here, and we are dating? I'm thinking that looks pretty tacky."
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